An ongoing project is the search engine optimisation of an online shoe shop - North Shoes, who are specialists in Clarks & Startrite Childrens Shoes.

A relatively recent arrival into selling online - yet with a shop history stretching all the way back to 1876 - the business owner is smart enough to realise they're not going to rank #1 for "buy shoes" at this stage (indeed, if ever).  Yet this doesn't mean that they can't benefit from search engine optimisation at the outset - both from traffic & sales.

Almost every market, no matter the subject, has around half the searches concentrated into <50 main keywords/phrases - usually 1 or 2 word combinations of generic terms.  For shoes, it's keywords like "Clarks" and "Mens Shoes".

The opportunity for people selling online is to target the other 50% of searches - searches by people who know what they want, who'll type into Google a much more specific search, such as "Clarks Bugtastic Khaki leather boys shoe".

With a well thought-through set-up of the eCommerce system & an easy-to-follow methodology for putting new products onto the online shop, these searches (which aren't overly competitive) can be targeted effectively & used to generate a lot of traffic - traffic which is more likely to buy.  Anyone with a specific idea of what they want is often a hot prospect.

The process we went through follows the Willson Web design approach:

- understand business objectives & agree SEO objectives
- research keywords & competition
- optimise main pages & set up the CMS to automatically optimise product pages
- put together an ongoing link building strategy

Objectives:

As a specialist supplier & fitter, as opposed to one chasing volume, we agreed to that SEO should deliver buying traffic from visitors looking for higher margin, lower volume brands

Research:

Looking at competition for relevant keywords for brands in stock, as well as relevant categories (eg Mens Shoes, Boys Shoes etc), we worked out what was achieveable in the first 12 months - in essence, targeting lower & mid-volume keywords

On Page optimisation:

We optimised the Home, Category & Brand pages according to our realistic assessment of the keywords / phrases we could rank for - we figure that 10% of the 10,000 searches for a particular category is always better than 0% of 100,000 searches

Content Management Set Up:

Working alongside the web developer, we put in place a way of ensuring that, when a product is entered onto the system, the product pages are automatically optimised.  This is the key part of eCommerce optimsation - ensuring the product title goes into the page URL, the main title & the Image Alternative text.  We also automated a meta description that encouraged searchers to click through - highlighting selling points like Free Shipping.

Product Addition to the Shop:

With the system set up, staff putting stock online simply need to make sure they name the product well.  Previously, staff were using the shoe reference number.  Now, they use:

Brand + Product Name + Colour + Type
eg
Clarks Dune Puzzle Navy Combi, Boys First Sandal

This optimises the product page itself for very specific searches, and also helps optimise the parent pages where the product also show (Boys First Shoes, Boys Sandals, Boys Shoes & Clarks)

We also arranged for a feed of the shop's products to be listed via Google Base - an excellent opportunity to "jump the queue" for search engine rankings by appearing in Google's "shopping results", now more often mixed in with traditional search results.

Ongoing linking strategy:

The most important element of search engine optimisation is creating quality links to your site.  With North Shoes, we made sure we applied to quality directories (such as DMOZ.org) and specialist shoe directories.

We then made sure that other marketing efforts, such as their local PR, included a concerted effort to get links when stories are being placed in newspapers & magazines - local papers have relatively strong websites, and getting that strength passed on via links is a great opportunity.

This is combined with an ongoing effort to get links through existing relationships with suppliers (such as the shoe brands) and contacts, both within the shoe industry & in related markets.

Results:

We made sure that the Google Analytics tracking was upgraded to track sales, as well as the standard site visits.  As a result, we can now see:

- 50% of the site's traffic is from unpaid search
- 65% of the site's revenue is from unpaid search

And the benefit of the new system set up and staff training on how to add products in a SEO-friendly way means that, as the site is updated & Google finds new pages, the sites visibility for the 50% of searches that are hotter sales prospects, will continue to increase.

Labels: search-engine-optimisation

Google has recently announced they're stopping the ability of Blogger to publish via FTP to your own domain.  So from March 26th, that means no more using Blogger within your own domain (although all the previously published files will stay on your hosting server).

It's a shame - although low-spec, Blogger does (or did) offer an easy-to-use, difficult to get wrong option, and you could use your own HTML template to fit the blog with the theme of your own site.

The reasons they state focus on the resource needed for a small amount of their user base, especially as some Google foundations they use are going offline, hence requiring even more effort.  I suspect there's also the matter of making Blogger profitable - and registering domains etc with Blogger (as opposed to FTP'ing to you existing domain) is their only current revenue generator.

But whatever the real reason, the fact remains that soon, it dies.  Time to head over to WordPress - even though there's more time needed, probably by shifting your whole site over, as well as the blog - it's worth it in the long run: more flexibility, easier to update all the pages on the site, and plenty of plugins that continue to offer new ways of finding & displaying information.

For those who do go down this route, here's a good place to export your Blogger posts to WordPress

Labels: online-marketing